Long NYT piece on Gulen schools in USA

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

There was a quite long piece in the New York Times a couple of days ago on American charter schools, particularly in Texas, that are associated with the Turkish religious figure Fethullah Gulen. Gulen, who was forced out of Turkey in 1999, is the center of a large network of schools, businesses, and media holdings (including Today's Zaman) located in Turkey and in other countries.

Fethullah Gulen

When I was doing research in the former USSR, I came across people who had studied in, or knew people who'd studied in, Gulen schools in Kazan, Ufa, Baku, and other places. Almost all of these schools have been shut down in recent years, mainly because of fears that the schools were spreading religious propaganda. Students, it seems, were often encouraged to study in Turkey, where they lived in dormitories, also controlled by the Gulen group, where a religious lifestyle was strongly encouraged.

In the United States, there seems to be no issue concerning religious instruction or pressure. Indeed, the schools seem to be much better than American schools at teaching science, which is hardly surprising.

According to the NYT article, there are about 120 Gulen-affiliated schools in the United States operating in 25 states.

The issue with the Gulen schools seems to be money, rather than religious instruction or pressure. Charter schools are profit-making entities, and the Gulen-connected schools are able to beat out the competition, in part, by paying their own teachers less than the prevailing wage.

In February, a Chicago charter school union affiliated with the American
Federation of Teachers complained to the federal Department of Labor,
alleging that the Chicago Math and Science Academy and Concept Schools, a
group that operates 25 schools in the Midwest, had abused the visa
system by “routinely assigning these teachers duties or class load that
seemingly do not take into account the laws governing H1-B visa
holders.”

The Labor Department had already been investigating at least one Concept
school. The investigation appeared to have been triggered by a
complaint in July 2008 by Mustafa Emanet, a network systems
administrator and teacher at a middle school in Cleveland. By law,
imported teachers must be paid “prevailing wage.” Mr. Emanet alleged
that while his visa reflected his promised salary, $44,000, he was
actually paid $28,000 his first year.

The schools also appear to be funneling public money (these schools are "charter schools," which means they are privately operated but receive public funding--an idea that George W. Bush and other critics of public education in this country have championed in recent years) to Gulen-affiliated businesses.

TDM Contracting was only a month old when it won its first job, an $8.2
million contract to build the Harmony School of Innovation, a publicly
financed charter school that opened last fall in San Antonio. It was one of six big charter school contracts TDM and another upstart
company have shared since January 2009, a total of $50 million in
construction business. Other companies scrambling for work in a poor
economy wondered: How had they qualified for such big jobs so fast?

The secret lay in the meteoric rise and financial clout of the Cosmos
Foundation, a charter school operator founded a decade ago by a group of
professors and businessmen from Turkey. Operating under the name
Harmony Schools, Cosmos has moved quickly to become the largest charter
school operator in Texas, with 33 schools receiving more than $100
million a year in taxpayer funds.

Also:

In response to questions, Harmony provided a list showing that local
American contractors had been awarded 13 construction and renovation
jobs over the years. But a review of contracts since January 2009 — 35
contracts and $82 million worth of work — found that all but 3 jobs
totaling about $1.5 million went to Turkish-owned businesses.

The schools also seem to be doing a good job of currying favor with local politicians:

One group, the Raindrop Foundation, helped pay for State Senator Leticia
Van de Putte’s travel to Istanbul last year, according to a recent
campaign report. In January, she co-sponsored a Senate resolution
commending Mr. Gulen for “his ongoing and inspirational contributions to
promoting global peace and understanding.”

In an interview, Ms. Van de Putte described the trip as a working visit.

I think the NYT piece highlights concerns relating to both the charter school 'system' in the United States and the Gulen movement more generally. Charter schools are attractive to some people because they take the management of education out of the hands of public officials and unions, putting schools instead in the charge of privately-run corporations which, it is thought, are more efficient and motivated to attract students. There is, without question, some logic to this argument, but it also seems clear that--especially in places like Texas, where there are only 9 public servants responsible for surveying more than 500 charter schools, there is often very little oversight.

The United States needs a strong public education system, not a mish-mash of fly-by-night organizations funneling public money back into their own allied businesses.

As for the Gulen group...well, people in Turkey know enough about them already. Partly by necessity, and partly by choice, they're a secretive network, and they seem quite dedicated to advancing their own with respect to jobs, contracts, and influence. This can be seen in academia in Turkey, and certainly in the media--and I don't think Today's Zaman is the only English-language news outfit reporting on Turkey that they control.

As is the case with the AKP--with whom the Gulen networks are allied, but not entirely--this isn't just about 'Islam.' Money is important, and so is power. The Gulen types are hardly the only folks in Turkey to be interested in money and power, but especially now their accumulation of both has become considerable.

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From the Borderlands Lodge...

I am an historian of the Turkic World with over 20 years of experience living in and writing about Turkey and the former USSR. My first impressions of the region came when I was working as an English teacher in Istanbul from 1992-1999. During these years I traveled extensively in the Balkans, Turkey, the former USSR, the Middle East and Asia, and studied Russian and Hungarian in addition to Turkish before returning to the US to pursue a graduate education.

After receiving an MA and PhD from Princeton and Brown universities, I held research fellowships with the NEH/American Research Institute in Turkey, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. Since August of 2009 I have been a professor of Islamic World History at Montana State University in the cool little ski town of Bozeman, MT, holding the rank of associate professor since 2015. My first book, Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, was published by Oxford University Press in November of 2014.

I am spending the 2016-2017 academic year in Russia through the support of a Fulbright research scholar grant.

Find me on...

Turks Across Empires

Oxford University Press, 2014

Reviews of Turks Across Empires

"...path-breaking...Meyer demonstrates brilliantly the shifts in articulation of cultural and political identities as well as change of the specific vocabulary in the written texts of the Turkic intellectuals."--Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas

"...a skillfully crafted and soundly constructed account...Meyer's book is a page-turner, admittedly not a common trait in scholarly history works. It frequently turns into a sort of amusement park for historians, where the author parades so many newly unearthed, rich in detail, and immensely informative archival documents...finely tackles somewhat delicate yet thorny matters such as Turkism, Pan-Turkism, Ottomanism, and Islamism, as well as addresses the lives of humans who were doomed and perished or sometimes enriched and saved by those very same matters." --American Historical Review

"This thoroughly researched monograph offers a noteworthy caveat to the infatuation with 'identity' that for almost two decades characterized the post-Soviet scholarship on the non-Russian peoples of the Russian and Soviet empires...Meyer leaves us convinced that discourses and claims of identity need to be understood in relation to concrete power configurations and resulting opportunities, and not as articulations of perennial or even would-be nationhood." -- Russian Review

"James Meyer's Turks across Empires is a very valuable and intriguing reassessment of the origins of pan-Turkism through an in-depth examination of some of its leading figures...a great pleasure to read...Meyer's book is 'revisionist' in the sense that it successfully challenges many assumptions and arguments in the study of Russia's Muslims and pan-Turkism...provides a more complete, flesh-and-bone biographical reconstruction of these intellectuals and their milieu...the depiction of Kazan Tatars as 'insider Muslims' of Tsarist Russia is simply brilliant."--Turkish Review

"[Turks Across Empires] presents a wealth of information drawn from archives, periodical publications, memoirs, and other documentary evidence in the languages needed for such a study: Ottoman, Russian, Tatar, and the Turkic of Azerbaijan... As a result, Meyer’s narrative fills in gaps and makes connections that nicely complement the steadily expanding literature on the late Ottoman/late Romanov period and the Turks who shaped their own and wider Turkic identities in that era. By extension, the identity question has profound implications for twentieth and even twenty-first century intellectual and political trajectories."--Review of Middle East Studies

"Based on an impressive array of sources from Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan, James Meyer’s monograph not only expands the knowledge about the Muslims of Russia but also provides a widely applicable argument about instrumentalization of identity in different political contexts." --Council for European Studies

"James Meyer pursues an imaginative approach to the final decades of the Russian and Ottoman Empires by focusing on the biographies of three activists—a Crimean Tatar, an Azerbaijani, and a Volga Tatar—who, while born in Russia, were men with substantial interest and experi- ence traveling to and living in the empire’s southern neighbor. Biography becomes, thus, the modus operandi for unraveling the roles of these and similar men—“trans-imperial people,” as Meyer calls them—in propagating pan-Turkism and suggesting it as a new identity for Turks, who were also overwhelmingly Muslim, everywhere."--Slavic Review

"A major contribution of this work is its use of original source material in Turkish, Ottoman Turkish and Russian. Using personal correspondence and Ottoman and Russian tsarist era archives, Meyer traces four distinct periods to their trans-imperial existence moving back and forth between Istanbul, Kazan, Crimea, and Azerbaijan...an important contribution in several ways."--Turkish Area Studies Review

"…the book does a very good job in bringing the complexities ofRussia’s Muslim intellectual life of the late imperial period close to a readership broadly interested in the modernization of Russia’s peripheries and in Russian-Ottoman relations… Meyer convincingly demonstrates that since the 1870s Muslim communities in inner Russia perceived the state as a threat, especially in view of the administrative attempts at taking control over Muslim schools."--Journal of World History

"...impressive...James Meyer’s book is a collective biography of the most prominent pan-Turkists—Yusuf Akçura (1876–1935), Ahmet Ağaoğlu (1869–1939), and İsmail Gasprinskii (1851–1914)—by means of which the author reveals the patterns of migration from the Middle Volga, Southeast Caucasus, and Crimea to the Ottoman lands and back, as well as local politics in each protagonist’s original region…The fruit of this admirable exercise is most visible when Meyer demonstrates the simultaneous formation of population policy on both the Russian and Ottoman shores of the Black Sea."--Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

"Few Ottomanists understand the complexities of the situation of Muslims in the Russian Empire, while scholars of the Russian Empire have tended to imagine the Ottoman Empire only in broad brushstrokes. Meyer is one of a small new crop of scholars who possess the requisite skills…The narrative is richly documented and thick—perhaps the best account of Volga–Ural public life in English…" --International Journal of Middle East Studies

"Meyer, assistant professor of Islamic world history at Montana State University, draws from Turkish, Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Russian archives to bridge the gap between borderlands and peoples in this innovative study of the origins of pan-Turkism. Tautly argued and empirically grounded, the book highlights the diverse nature of identity formulation during the late imperial era, when the forces of modernity presented new challenges to traditional religious communities".--Canadian Slavonic Papers

"Turks Across Empires is deeply-researched, drawing on sources in Russian and multiple Turkic languages from no fewer than thirteen archives in the former Soviet Union and Turkey. This research is showcased beautifully in chapter one (‘Trans-Imperial People’), which is a superb, groundbreaking introduction to the large demographic of Muslims who — like Akcura, Gasprinskii and Agaoglu — moved between the Russian and Ottoman Empires"--Slavonic and East European Review